Heard and worked 9U0A - easily, which is fairly rare for the West Coast. It was very nice to have conditions that I can remember on the high bands back before the big sunspot depression (even going back to 2005 or so). I did work a DX-ped there back in 2007 - for my all time new Burundi, but I do remember that that was very much ESP.

The bottom of the sunspot cycle forced me to try to squeeze more directivity and gain out of my all wire antenna farm. Now with the upswing in the cycle - and heading into winter on the low bands - all of my antenna work seems to be paying off.

My W8JK is based on a mod documented in the "Antennas for all Locations" by Les Moxon - and also a white paper written by W5LJ. It works much better than the original W8JK - in fact, it performs exactly like my old 2 element SteppIR yagi - but at a fraction of the cost.

It is essentially a 2 element 17M wire yagi, but when fed as a W8JK - using 450 ohm ladder line for the 180 degree phase line and with a 4:1 balun 6" back from the center of the phasing line. It performs much better than when I just fed the wire yagi as a regular yagi.

I had a "regular" W8JK before and thought it was just OK. In fact, the regular W8JK seemed a lot like the old 2 element SteppIR when it was in bi-directional mode. In fact, I would not be surprised if the matching network that is used on the 2 element SteppIR is a 180 degree phase shift in that mode.

I have even seen some other very interesting mods - such as a Moxon fed using a W8JK feed.

On 40M I have a 2 element Bruce Array that I raised the feedpoint above my house - and that antenna went from "so so" to what I had hoped for - a 2 element vertical array. I recently worked ZS8M with it - and could tell that I was one of the very few on the West Coast who even heard him.

The K3 receiver is the other side of the performance equation. I had a Yaesu FT-2000D, and it paled in comparison to the K3. What a difference!

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